Conventionally, when a financial presentation device, such as a credit card or debit card is used in a transaction, a primary transaction data record is generated that includes the payment amount, the date of transaction, and merchant information (name, city, state and ZIP code). To an ever great extent, financial presentation device service networks (‘financial service networks’) such as Visanet acquire additional transactional information referred to as ‘enhanced data’ or ‘enhanced transaction data’. Enhanced data, often described as either Level II or Level III data, is any non-financial data beyond the primary transaction data and includes invoice level and line item details. This data allow issuers and their corporate clients to obtain line item detailed information about their employees' travel and business expenditures. For example, for a lodging transaction, enhanced data may include such data as a daily room rate, tax amount, telephone charges, gift shop purchases, movie charges, laundry charges, check-in date, check-out date, mini-bar charges, parking and valet charges and the like. The enhanced data is collected at the merchant point-of-sale but may be delivered through the financial service network in a different form and/or at a different time from the primary transaction record generated at the point of sale. In general, enhanced data may be delivered to a financial service network directly from merchants, from acquirers associated with the merchants, and through data consolidators that gather data from the merchants and/or acquirers.
Owing to the large number of different types and categories of enhanced data and the different entities which gather it, enhanced data arrives at data depositories of the financial services networks in a wide variety of different data formats with varying levels of completeness and accuracy, which has made it difficult to assess the quality of the enhanced data received. For instance, enhanced data records from some sources may contain a large number of data anomalies including missing data fields misplaced data, incorrect data formats, etc.
Therefore, it would be desirable to accurately determine the quality of the enhanced data.